Contrasting visions on book restrictions, school funding and more are on the ballot this November as voters choose between a Republican and Democrat to represent Congressional District 3 on Colorado’s State Board of Education.
Four new board members will be elected into the Colorado State Board of Education in roughly two weeks. The board consists of eight members representing Colorado’s congressional districts and one at-large member, making up a six-member Democratic majority. Members serve six-year terms and are not paid.
The board’s job is to oversee regulations and policies that govern public education and libraries, appoint Colorado’s education commissioner and department personnel, approve the department’s budget and set teaching standards, among other responsibilities.
Third Congressional District candidates Ellen Angeles (D-Montrose) and Sherri M. Wright (R-Cortez) will be facing off in November to serve a district of roughly 723,000 people in the state’s north-central region. The district covers 27 counties across 50,000 square miles along Colorado’s Western Slope and bordering Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico.
Stephen Varela (R-Pueblo), who was appointed to the Board of Education from Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District in January 2023, resigned Oct. 1, nearly three months before the end of his term. Varela left to accept a position with Pueblo District 60 working with special education students, as state statute prevents district employees from serving on the board, according to a news release from the Colorado Department of Education.
Varela had earlier decided to not finish his full term in order to run for Congress, but he didn’t receive enough votes during the June 25 Republican primary to make it onto the ballot.
A vacancy committee from the 3rd Congressional District, composed of members from the Republican Party, convened to nominate Wright to replace Varela until the November election following his early departure from the school board.
District demographics and voter trends
Congressional District Three has 504,308 active voters, 47% of which are unaffiliated. The number of Republican voters is greater than Democrats, who represent roughly 29% and 22% of voters respectively.
The last time Congressional District 3’s State Board of Education position was held by a Democrat was in 1996, with five Republican board members having held the office since then.
Meet the District Three candidates
Ellen Angeles
Originally from Toledo, Ohio, Angeles’s experience with education stems largely around her 20 years of teaching in K-12 classrooms and at Colorado Mountain College, which has brought her to educator jobs in Leadville, Durango and Montrose. She previously worked in banking and sales, and has her masters from Colorado Mesa University.
Angeles also has a child in the school district, which she said has helped her understand education as both an educator and a parent.
“When I win this seat, my most important priority is going to be defending public education, and making sure that children have the best education that they can have,” she said in the debate.
Angeles has received endorsements from local leaders in politics and education, including U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, House District 58 Rep. Barbara McLachlan, Montrose Mayor Barbara Bynum, Grand Junction Mayor Abram Herman, the American Federation of Teachers (Colorado chapter) and the Colorado Education Association.
Sherri Wright
Wright has been in education since 1981, when she took her first education job as a middle school teacher in the Montezuma-Cortez School District. Aside from her focused career in education, Wright has served as the director of Battle Rock Charter School, board president for the San Juan Basin Vocational and Technical College, Montezuma-Cortez RE-1 school board president and as a member of the Colorado Association of School Boards, according to her campaign website.
She credits Varela’s endorsement as one of the reasons she decided to run for the school board.
“Stephen Varela informed me the first of the year that he was running for Congress and he was going to have to resign, and he asked me to run. And with my background, I decided that I would shoot for the stars,” she said.
Wright identified three topics that defined her campaign: education, parental rights and school choice. She doesn’t list any endorsements on her campaign website.
A stark difference in policies
Topics surrounding indoctrination, book banning, school choice and parent involvement took the spotlight during the Club 20 debates for Western Slope elections, reflecting some of the region’s most pressing concerns surrounding education.
In conversations with the Post Independent, Angeles and Wright shared their stances on some of these issues.
Student scores and achievement
Wright’s guiding principle for Colorado’s education system centers around raising the bar for achievement and moving toward a heavier focus on core curriculum.
“I believe that we need to make sure that we are teaching our children the basics: reading, writing, math,” Wright told the Post Independent. “We have third graders that cannot read. We need to figure out why and get them on track.
Since the pandemic, Colorado districts have seen statewide dips in participation and test scores in Colorado Measures of Academic Success tests and the PSAT/SAT. In September, the State Board of Education voted to temporarily lower SAT graduation requirements after fewer Colorado high schoolers met the state’s Digital SAT graduation requirements in 2024.
“We want to see (expectations met) at 90% at least,” Lenetta Schull, Wright’s proxy during the Club 20 debate, said. “We need to raise our standards, not lower our standards.”
Wright’s written statement for the Club 20 debate, read aloud by Schull, warned of inclusion in schools, stating that it would not help students improve their personal performance in class.
“(Inclusion) means that all students will get the same education — not at the rate of their ability to learn, but at the rate the lowest students learn,” Shull read. “Folks, this is equity, not equality.”
Wright’s approach promises “student outcome” over “indoctrination,” where all students will be taught the same material, but at their individual level. She added that a solid educational foundation also means bringing patriotism back into the classroom.
Angeles’ idea of improving education for the student directly correlates to their teachers. One benefit of improving teacher pay in Colorado, Angeles said, is that understaffed districts can fill their roster with qualified educators, which in-turn could help to reduce classroom sizes.
“We need smaller class sizes,” she said. “Smaller class sizes will help with the mental health of children, it’ll help with being heard, it’ll help with the struggling kids, it’ll be where you help the gifted students get more opportunities to blossom and grow, too.”
Angeles also mentioned the advantage of alternative learning programs — like internships and volunteering — that can help address the “Colorado skills gap.”
“We underestimate how we have a need for hairdressers or electricians or people that work in the agriculture industry,” she said. “College is great, but it’s not for every single kid.”
Funding and teacher shortages
Angeles identified funding as one of the most pressing issues in Colorado education, especially for public schools.
“Our schools are underfunded and our teachers are underpaid,” she said.
Colorado’s per-pupil funding has been lower than the national average for decades, which Angeles said presents a barrier to helping students further their careers when they graduate. She praised the passing of Senate Bill 24-188 — which increased the statewide base per pupil funding for 2024-25 by $419.97 to $8,496.38 to account for inflation — for helping increase funding to the state, but said “we still have work to do.”
Educators in Colorado rank as the 49th lowest-paid in the U.S., according to data from the National Education Association. Angeles said that when factoring in the cost of living and housing, the ranking is closer to 50.
Wright stated that she also believes in increased funding for rural schools, especially considering that rural communities do not have the flexibility to raise their mill levies based on need. Supporting teachers, Wright added, also means raising the state’s expectations for licensed educators.
“I also believe that colleges need to educate teachers better,” she said. “They need to teach teachers how to teach … I saw new teachers that did not know how to teach. They did not know how to have classroom control. And I think that our colleges are severely lacking in that area.”
Amendment 80 and school choice
Angeles said her community of Montrose already exercises great school choice opportunities, and that Amendment 80 is not only unnecessary but harmful.
“I’m 100% against it,” she said. “It’ll hurt rural schools even more than it’ll hurt the urban schools.”
In response to Wright’s question of whether parents have “the basic right to know what their children are being taught,” Angeles said the Colorado Academic Standards is public information so that parents can be informed about what their children are learning.
“But the most important way to find out what your student is being taught is to have dinner with them and talk about it over the table, and to go in and volunteer in the classrooms,” Angeles said. She encouraged parents and guardians to get involved with their schools, since many students don’t have loved ones who can help them with their studies at home.
“We need many trusted adults for our children as they learn,” Angeles said.
Wright told the Post Independent she believes parents should know what their children are being taught, which is one of the many reasons why she’s in favor of Amendment 80.
“I am completely supporting it,” she said. “I do not believe in adding things to our Constitution, but I do believe that this is something that will benefit Colorado.”
Book bans
While Wright said she wouldn’t be supportive of complete book bans, her campaign has been brainstorming a potential rating system that would place books into appropriate age categories not too dissimilar to age restrictions for movies.
“I want to be clear: I do not believe in banning books,” she said. “I am a language arts teacher. I believe books are valuable. They serve a purpose, but I also believe that there are certain books that are made for certain ages.”
Wright’s proposed book-rating system would separate educational and children’s books from those with mature content — such as those containing explicit sex scenes — which children would still be able to read with parent permission.
“You would not allow a child, a third grade student, to go in and watch an R-rated movie. So why would we allow them to read a book with the same content?” she said.
Angeles said she would not be supportive of Wright’s proposed book rating system. She cited Wright’s support in 2021 to change the Montezuma-Cortez school district’s elementary curriculum, partially because it contained elements of critical race theory, which the district publicly opposed while Wright served as board president.
“I can’t cater a classroom to 28 different parents. So I’m going to trust the experts in our community,” Angeles said during the debate.
Social justice issues
In Wright’s written questions to Angeles during the Sept. 21 debate, she asked whether Angeles was in favor of allowing biological males — referring to transgender females — to use the women’s restroom in K-12 schools and participate in girls’ sports. Angeles responded by saying that she would follow the guidance of the Colorado High School Athletic Association, arguing that the decision doesn’t fall on the State Board of Education.
The question of whether parents should be notified if their children ask to be called by a different name or different pronouns in school was met with a similar answer, with Angeles stating that state law allows educators to call children what they want to be called.
“Hopefully children have a good-enough relationship with their parents to talk about this, and hopefully those parents love their children enough to help them through that,” Angeles said.
Wright has previously expressed her views against allowing transgender students to participate in sport teams outside of their biological sex, particularly in one of her flyers for an Oct. 1 campaign open house.
“I do not believe that males belong in girls’ restrooms or showers, because I have seen young men take advantage of that and girls are damaged,” she said, speaking generally to news stories from outside the district. “But I want to stress, I am not against transgender students or people. I just think they have their own place.”
Angeles said her conversations with district coaches have made it clear that this is not a problem in the district. Wright agreed, saying that her advocacy on the topic has been more of a preventative measure.
Angeles leads Wright in campaign funding
As of the filing period ending on Oct. 9, Angeles has raised over $33,700 from 251 individual contributors, and spent $27,000.
The biggest contributions to her campaign come from the Colorado Democratic Party at $5,500, the Montrose County Democratic Central Committee at $2,000 and the Montezuma County Democratic Committee, Colorado Fund for Children and Public Education, La Plata County Democratic Party and Pitkin County Democratic Party at $1,000 each.
Some notable contributors include Colorado State Treasurer Dave Young, former Cortez Mayor Mike Lavey and State Board of Education Vice-Chairwoman Lisa Escárcega.
Wright has raised over $9,100 in campaign contributions from 28 unique donors and spent around $5,100.
Wright’s largest contributors are the Montrose County Republican Central Committee ($2,000),
Mesa County Republican Party ($1,000), Montezuma County Republican Central Committee ($900), Southwest Republican Women small donor committee ($500) and Delta County Republican Central Committee ($500).
Two of Wright’s most recent contributors are Clark Craig — the Republican candidate for the Colorado House of Representatives District 59 — and his wife, Sharon Craig, at $250 each in donations. Also on her contributor list with $400 is State Board of Education member Steve Durham (R-Colorado Springs), representing the Fifth Congressional District.
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